The Year of Nick Spencer, Part 1: Image Expo, Boats and Paradigms [Interview]

We’ve often been avid fans of Nick Spencer’s work here at Multiversity (obviously). Having started the site around the same time his comics first started being released, we’ve had the unique change to watch Nick’s career grow as we ourselves grew up as a site, often chatting and supporting his various endeavors. And with Nick about to have his five-year anniversary in comics and with three books announced at last week’s Image Expo, we thought it was a great time to sit down and have an extended chat with Nick about his work.

Today, in the first installment of our three-part interview series with Nick Spencer, we talk about his time at Image Expo, his five years in comics and the first of three announcements: “Paradigms,” with Butch Guice.

So, Image Expo — three brand new books! Image Expo was huge this year. How are you feeling coming back from that?

Nick Spencer: It was really great. I did the first one, which was a very different event in nature; it was more of a mini-convention that they did in Oakland. I wasn’t at the last one, and I really hated missing it. For me, I’ve been at Image for five years and I’ve completely bought in — I’m a total company man when it comes to them. I just really believe in Eric’s vision for the company. So much of how I define my career and my identity as a writer is associated with Image. So it’s a huge point of pride for me, you know, seeing stuff like this and how much has changed.

My first Image book was “Existence 2.0,” and I remember everybody being super happy that it did, like, 3,000 in orders. And we did a second print of, like, a thousand, and we thought we were on a hot streak! And then I remember when “Morning Glories” hit, and that was a huge success. Everybody was thrilled about that. And I think our final orders, if you don’t count the extra prints and stuff, were under 10,000. But at the time, that was a fantastic number for a new Image book; that was a runaway hit. We did a few other prints that got us up near twenty, but even still, now it’s not at all strange to see Image books debut at four or five times that number, to find much higher levels as they go on. The game has just changed entirely, and that kept going through my head at the event, just the scale of it — I mean, it was so professional, it was absolutely terrifying. [Laughs]

A lot of that is owed to Ron Richards, who came on board last year and has been doing a phenomenal job. He’s kind of the master when it comes to putting together good comic-related events. I just, for me, again, as cheesy as it might sound, to see all those creators there, to see Scott and Rick and Matt and Kelly Sue and Ed and Kieron and Jamie, and obviously Robert, just the whole list. This is the Golden Age. This is insane. I think it’s very hard to appreciate moments when you’re in them, but this is a pretty unparalleled time for truly creator-owned comics. You’ve got to go back to when the company started to reach a moment like this, and I feel really lucky to just be a small part of it and just to get to be around for it. The entire landscape of creator-owned independent comics is completely different than it was a few years ago, and everything is so much better in almost every possible way with only, like, the smallest of caveats. It’s just a very lucky roll of the dice to be writing comics and to be writing creator-owned comics right now.

And you were saying before we started that you’re coming up on your five year anniversary too this year, from when you started at Image.

NS: Yeah. I mean, my first book was at Image, my second book, third book, fourth book, fifth book I think. I think one of the things that I’m the most proud of in my career is that I never lost sight of the importance of doing work that you yourself own, that you created. Even when I had my first hit and Marvel and DC— the phone was ringing off the hook with offers to write every sixteen year old girl that either company owned, but I never lost sight of how important it was to stick with that. While maybe we didn’t ship as much as we would’ve liked, pretty much every month of my career I’ve had an Image book come out — and that’s a huge deal for me. I’m really glad that I didn’t walk away from that. And as a result, we have something like “Morning Glories,” where we’re coming up seven trade volumes and three hardcovers, and we’ve got slipcovers and compendiums on the way… To have that shelf is maybe the most rewarding thing about the whole endeavor.

So, with Image Expo, you announced three new books. I can’t imagine that being up on that stage, nearly five years laters, to do three books when everyone else is doing one, maybe two — I imagine that was really daunting?

NS: I didn’t know I was going to be the only announcing so many things. [Laughs] Eric didn’t tell me.

At the last one, a lot of folks had announced two. So I thought, well, three might be a bit much, but y’know, it’s probably OK. As it turned out, just as circumstances allowed, almost everybody announced one; Joe Keatinge announced two, but pretty much everybody announced one new thing. A lot of that was because you had returning people from the first one, who had already announced two, so really they’ve announced three over the course of the two Expos. It just feels different because of the timing. At any rate, I didn’t realize that until I was there and about to go on stage. For the rest of the day, everybody that I talked to had this kind of mix of worry and trepidation and a little bit of pity. Everybody was freaked out! At the event, there was almost this marketing stuff, with the line ‘i for invention’ or whatever, and for me the I was for Intervention, because that’s kind of how the rest of my day went — Literally the first interview that I did after was with Comics Therapy, and the first question that I got asked was about my work/life balance. [Laughs] It was a nice peek into what everyone was thinking about me.

But, it was really fun because I think that it made a strong statement about exactly how committed I am to that part of my career and how important doing creator-owned work is for me and how much I value the relationship with Image. It was nice to make a strong statement with three books, that part felt good.

I have to say, the night before Image Expo, I had a dream about what the event would be like…

NS: Right.

And through all the weird things about the dream, like Image Expo being held on a boat for some reason–

NS: [Laughs] Forward that to Eric and Ron, by the way, because I love that idea.

Just rent out a huge yacht or something, right?

NS: It’d be pretty baller at that point.

So in this dream, the only announcement I saw was you. And you came out to announce a book, singular, but you sang it. [Laughs] You sang the announcement, and I was really disappointed when I didn’t get to go, and in reading all these reports, no one said you came out and sang the announcements.

NS: Can I just say that your dream announcement is so much better than my actual announcement? [Laughs] Next year we will auto-tune the announcements on a yacht. That all sounds incredible to me.

It sounds like a Kanye West music video.

NS: I know! I was just talking about how great the event was, and now I’m like, the event is so much lamer than what Matt cooked up. Matt’s subconscious should handle all the logistics for the next Image Expo.

I’ll pitch that to Ron and see how into that idea he is. But, OK —

NS: Do you remember what I was singing about? You didn’t even care what the book was about, just the gimmick of me singing the announcement. That’s depressing.

Well, I cared! Not to go too deep into the dream, but there was a problem. I was supposed to do the live blog, as I did in real life, and I was having problems because I forgot my laptop. All I had was a CD-RW and a marker.

NS: [Laughs] The two worst possible things to have for the job!

And it’s funny, I woke up and immediately e-mailed the other editors this dream, and then it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I did end up having problems initially getting the liveblog going, and in my dream David got mad at me because all I brought was a CD-RW and he got mad at me in real life too. So it was this weird thing that happened. But. That’s a tangent. I’m going to cut this out.

NS: I don’t know if you should. I like all this.

So, I want to talk about the books that you announced. What is interesting to me is that, in the press release that was immediately released after — including your statements on stage, none of the books really went too deep into what they are. So I was hoping, as we go through, you could re-iterate a bit; I know you’re always kind of cagey with details as a mystery writer, but… OK, starting with “Paradigms.” It’s described as a contemporary, fantasy epic with a spy-thriller aesthetic, but could you go into a bit more detail about what the book is about?

NS: I’ll start with how I explained it at the Expo. It’s a book about a world in the shadows of our own, with these warring clans of magic users who serve at the will of these primordial, near-omnipotent beings that are sort of removed from our reality but can influence and impact it. Each of these clans is sort of the acting hand for one of these deities, and the magic that they use is very karmic in nature; if it’s used in a way that doesn’t please that deity, if it’s abused in some way or misapplied or even if they just fail in whatever objective they’ve set out to reach, the blowback of that, the repercussions for the entire clan can be pretty dire. So it’s really about these clans who are at war because the deities that they represent are at war — and they’re trying, through very much a veil, to discern the will and whim of these ancient, capricious, vengeful and violent beings… If they get it wrong, they pay a pretty heavy price for it.

The book is very much about man’s relationship with gods and belief systems, and the plusses and minuses of them. Some of the stuff thematically is, I think, familiar terrain, particularly to “Morning Glories” readers who know I have kind of very mixed opinions on pursuits of faith in general. I’m always kind of working through that a bit. “Paradigms” is a much more overt examination of that.

I was going to bring up “Morning Glories,” actually, because that is a very similar theme I think, between the two, with the idea of worship. I think what’s interesting about “Morning Glories” is that we’re looking at it through the veil of established religion, established ideology. So does “Paradigms” have more of an invented mythology to it?

NS: Yeah, exactly. A huge part of what defines “Paradigms” is what it isn’t as much as what it is. If you look at contemporary fantasy as a genre, it’s a really interesting subgenre that’s very much dominated by a few things. Most contemporary fantasies tend to deal with common folklore and myth that we all know; you’ll see a lot of vampires and werewolves and witches, that makes up the bulk of contemporary fantasy — everything from Gaiman to Rowling, “Dresden Files,” Sookie Stackhouse. That’s what you think of when you think of contemporary fantasy usually. So one of the first things I wanted to do was set up a mythology that’s completely removed from all that; there’s no recognizable deities, none of what you’d consider earthbound fantasy tropes. This is very much an attempt to transplant a more traditional fantasy structure and just lay it over the current, present day world.

The caveat to that is, typically when I look at contemporary fantasy, the traditional route in is you take somebody who is living a normal life, living lives like the rest of us, and they’re sucked into this other world and suddenly become our fresh eyes that guide us through the whole thing. I didn’t want to do that, either; I love those stories, it’s a very popular approach and it’s easy to see why, because it’s a very effective way to educate people on the world without a big exposition dump, but for whatever reason every single time I read a story like that, it makes that secret world seem smaller to me. It’s just something that, as a reader, I always have had a weird aversion to, for no logical reason. And so I didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to sweat the details too much, I didn’t want to spend too much time worrying about the internal logic of how this world exists in conjunction with ours.

I use this comparison elsewhere, but I wanted the approach to be sort of like when you’re watching somebody do Shakespeare, and they do it in a present-day setting, and they just don’t really sweat the fact that these two houses don’t actually exist in the present day. It doesn’t matter. Just move on, this is what it is and it’s happening! Audiences can go along with that. They’re fine with it. But so often we feel like we can’t do it, that we have to make sense of it, so I just wanted to skip that and say this is how it is. These are warring magic clans in the way you’d see in any kind of high fantasy novel, but they have cars and live in skyscrapers and they’re in London and Dubai and Prague. It’s just how it is. Don’t worry about it.

So, in some ways I think what makes the book unique is that alchemy, and that weird mix of possible and impossible.

So is there a central lead that you try and point the book towards, or is it more spread out? It sounds like the latter.

NS: It is, and that was one of the challenges with this one, that I wanted to do world building and I wanted to do it a little looser. If you look at most of my books, they have defined endpoints, they’re trains moving on a track towards a destination. On this, there’s a little bit of that but probably less than any creator-owned book I’ve ever worked on. This is more about getting into this world. I’ve got a lot of defined conflicts and beats that we’re going to hit, but really I just kind of wanted to create and live in this world, so we’re going to go all around it. One of the things that will become apparent pretty quickly is that there’s not one protagonist or hero that you’re going to follow around. With this kind of story, I think you always start a little close in and then you open it, and that’s certainly going to be the case here. I’m sure we’re going to talk about the Game of Thrones influence, but I really did want to be apolitical about it; I really thought that there was beauty in putting these various groups on similar footing and letting it stay that way.

Well, you bring up Game of Thrones, and that’s as good of a segue as anything. I think the thing about Game of Thrones is that every series like this compares to now. I think the fantasy staple used to be Lord of the Rings, but the popularity of Game of Thrones has changed that. So what kind of influence does that series towards how you focus on the narrative? Is it similar in that we jump around between places and houses, or are you trying to be a bit more focused?

NS: I think with the nature of a monthly comic, you have to be slightly more focused. You know who I think is doing a fantastic riff on this kind of storytelling in comics right now? Greg Rucka and Michael Lark on “Lazarus,” which has very quickly become one of my favorite books. I’m taking studious notes as to how they walk you into that world. For anybody who hasn’t checked out that book, my god, it really is incredible work. I think the nature of monthly comics — and I’ve learned this the hard way, I think, you know with stuff like “Morning Glories” — you have to be aware of the medium that you’re working in’s differences, both strengths and weaknesses. I don’t want to overwhelm straight out of the gate. Unlike “Morning Glories,” the state of confusion is not really the desired place for people in this book. So we’ll walk you in nice and slow, but certainly as we go on, we will definitely hop around the world a lot. I have an idea of how we’re going to do it, and when the first transition will occur, and I think it’s one of the things I’m most excited about in the book.

Going back to the comparison, I think that with Tolkien, it’s quest-based, you know? Everything is getting to a point to acquire something, and that was the primary driver of most fantasy stories for generations after that. This isn’t that; this is much more about the politics of this world, but not in the dry sense, not in the esoteric sense. It’s about the movements of these groups and how they position against one another, and the sort of chessboard maneuvers that they take. One of the fun things is, while we keep saying that they’re warring, it is very much a cold war. There’s a sort of tentative uneasy truce that has existed, and of course we kind of take that and mess it all up very quickly. It’s not a full-on state of bloodshed. In fact, so much of what the book is is attempts to prevent violence, which I think we need a lot more of in comics. That’s something that I’m really proud of about this story, that so much of it is about trying to prevent fights. So I think that that will make it stand out a bit.

If I’m correct, this is your first foray into fantasy on the written side. Is that correct?

NS: Yeah, and that was kind of the big challenge in front of me on this one. With each new book, I kind of set a thing for myself, as in, “Here’s a thing you haven’t done before, now show that you can do it.” I have always been generally a science fiction writer with occasional dalliances into street-level or crime stuff, but I’ve heavily favored science fiction. So in the same way that when it was time to do “Bedlam” I had to do an episodic procedural rather than a long-form mystery, to show I can do something that’s Arc A and Arc B and Arc C, each being their own story and have it be a procedural which I’d never done before. I challenged myself on this one like that, to do a book where there is no science, there’s even no attempt at science here. Within the fantasy genre, it’s considered a hard-magic system, a system with plusses and minuses and set rules in terms of how it has to function, but it’s all mysticism, it’s all fantasy. There is no attempt to underpin that with something more science-based.

So that was a challenge for me, and not just that but a lot of the tropes that you see in fantasy writing are so different from any other genre. That was stuff that I’d never written before, so there was a thrill in tackling that. Again, for me, that was made that much sweeter by transposing that onto a modern day Earth setting; the fun for me was, OK, what does that familiar fantasy trope look like here? And that was something that was kind of a blast as we were coming up with some of the conceptual work on the book.

Again, a wonderful segue. You’re doing this book with, and I apologize if I pronounce this incorrectly, Butch Guice — (Editor’s note: just assume I said it wrong here.)

NS: Butch Guice! I’m going to re-use interview lines here, and I apologize because I know how much that sucks, but I love the mystery of pronouncing Butch’s name. Literally every single person that I talk to apologizes and very tentatively says the name, and I’m not giving it away. I will protect it like the ending of “Morning Glories.” [Laughs]

I worked with Butch on “Secret Avengers” for a few issues, and it was a huge dream come true for me. He is one of my all-time favorite artists. I don’t think he knows exactly how big a fan I am. He’s just somebody who I’ve always bought a book with his name on it, period. He’s one of those artists that, when you kind of minds-eye your comics, I think of Butch a lot. And he’s such a nice and kind gentleman, so positive to interact with and stuff. I asked him if he was interested in doing a creator-owned book, I thought it was a real long shot and I thought for sure he’d say no, but I realized I would never get another opportunity so I would be kicking myself if I didn’t try. Thankfully, he was all for the idea and very excited about it, and its just been such a thrill to be doing a creator-owned book with Butch. I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.

First of all, he’s a master and a legendary figure in the industry at this point. The aesthetic that we’re cultivating on this book, if you’ve been reading his most recent stuff on “Captain America” or “Winter Soldier” with Ed Brubaker or with myself on “Secret Avengers,” the guy just does the perfect spy book. But he’s also done more than his share of fantasy work— most recently on “Thor.” So when it’s a book that has the pinnings of Game of Thrones but you want it to look like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, there’s literally no better artist in the world for this book than Butch. So, yeah, this is a huge deal for me.

Working on a creator-owned project as opposed to for-hire, what has the collaboration been like for the two of you so far?

NS: It’s been really great. It’s early on and we’re very much in the fun part of things where we’re batting ideas back and forth and just kind of talking stuff through. What I would say, in the long run, is for Butch, he’s excited about… We’re going to have some time to deliver this first arc, we’re not rushing this out. I think it’s really exciting, when you’re starting these things and you haven’t stuck them on a schedule yet so you don’t have that clock ticking, and everyone just wants to do their best work.

Work-for-hire, I really enjoy it, but I don’t know that people on the outside know exactly how harsh those deadlines can be. They can in fact be really brutal, and when they’re like that, as much as you might be enjoying it, there’s a lot of stress and pressure involved. I think a huge part of this book was structuring it and setting it up so this can be something we just really enjoy doing, and we don’t necessarily have to feel the bad things; where hopefully we can just have the good parts.

So, I think “Aquaman” is maybe the closest I’ve seen him do a fantasy-type story, with Kurt Busiek.

NS: “Sword of Atlantis!” Fantastic run. My favorite run, all due respect to Geoff Johns. It’s just really great. My favorite Aquaman book ever.

I was going to ask, in term of aesthetic or design, have you guys sort of nailed down the visual book? Most hard fantasy really has that classic look, you know? Kings and castles and that sort of thing, so are you taking it in that direction at all, or just spinning it off in another one?

NS: No, I mean, that’s again part of the fun. You’ll see traces of that, but again, it’s a modern day world setting. So you’re getting the equivalent of a lot of those things. You’re getting the mirror image. That’s always fun to think about, in this context. What’s a castle now? Where would you put that person now? A million questions just like that tend to follow. I think that stuff is going to be fun, but again with keeping traces of the traditional in place.

So you’ll feel it around the borders, and on top of that, one of Butch’s earliest things when we just talked through the broad sort of “What do you want to draw” questions, one of the things that he said was that he really loves drawing locations. He likes taking the book to exotic locales and to different cities, and exploring that. So that is something that I’ve been keeping in mind, to make sure that the book has a sense of geography and a sense of place, lots of establishing shots and lots of shots that clue you into the world beyond the room that they’re in. That’s been a nice little challenge to keep in mind, because for writers we have a tendency to write conversations or confrontations and, a lot of the times, they’re just in an office or wherever. It’s something that’s easy to drop the ball on.

It’s nice to kind of have that as a challenge as well, to have that in the back of your head, “Yeah, wouldn’t this scene be better if we set it here rather than just anywhere?” So that’s something we’re doing a lot of.